For too many, graduating is walking off a cliff. At this culminating point of the analysts long education, there may be only silence, loss or absence. The precipice has recently grown steeper. My purpose here is to depict some reasons for this transitional hazard and to outline some possible remedies, both broad and specific. I hope that some of these ideas will ring true, based as they are on my own experiences and on those of friends and colleagues from around the country.
My task is made more complex by the multiple realities we call psychoanalytic training. During my two years of leadership with the newly forming Affiliate Council, and later, during my term on the Committee on Institutes, I was struck continually by the differences in training experience arising from the varied climates of the institutes themselves. Some places create a seemingly impermeable wall between candidates and faculty; others need the new helping hands so desperately that candidates feel burdened by committee responsibilities. The climate in a small institute in which there are too few training analysts and faculty portends a very different future from that offered by a larger group where analysts vie for positions on committees and for teaching responsibilities. What sort of future within the life of the institute beckons to any individual candidate? And what is one's psychoanalytic life after graduation?
We don't know much about what happens to most of our graduates. We know that most become active members and pay increased dues, phased in over the next two years, but what is the experience like? I remember the day some years back when I received my Ph.D. All my dissertation revisions had been approved, and the magical day arrived at long last. I obtained the signatures of the three members of my dissertation committee. Then I went to work the next day, searching for excuses to use my new stationery.
Many candidates have a similar threadbare and rather anticlimactic experience at this, the finish line of the formal education marathon, begun at the tender age of four or five: a whimper, not a bang. Some institutes have no formal graduation ceremonies; in smaller institutes, in particular, the event might apply to only one person at a time and may be overlooked. To have no external marker at this point in one's career is inconsistent with the importance of the undertaking, especially if one expects oneself to move on to yet another set of hurdles: becoming certified. Given the low value placed on all things psychoanalytic by our mass culture, what a shame that we sometimes do not even honor our own colleagues' high achievements.
In the past five years, the stratification of membership (more hotly contested in the American than in some other groups, and now centered around the issues related to certification) has been altered greatly by the formation of the Affiliate Council. Before that came de-linkage, the elimination of color-coded name badges at the meetings, and other, less obvious changes. Affiliate members (candidates) now have their own representative body within the association's governance, their own portions of the scientific program, and their own page in TAP.
An ironic and unfortunate concomitant of these otherwise laudable changes has affected new graduates most. It amounts to a decrease in status at a time when honors would be most deserved and welcome.
Candidacy is a time when one receives enormous attention in a variety of ways, wanted and unwanted. This attention has recently been mirrored within APsaA by the emergence of the Affiliate Council, other candidate-centered activities at the meetings, and by the myriad new opportunities for involvement in committees within the organization.
Now I graduate. Depending upon the climate of my institute, I may become a nobody for several years. If there is no clear role for me within the institute, I may drift away from visits to the institute and from contact with other analysts. There may be a significant erosion of my nascent analytic identity. Conversely, if the volunteer corps of analysts who run the institute are burning out, I may be conscripted to serve as chair of one or more committees that hold no interest for me.
The recent graduate's role can become negatively defined. I am now not a candidate, but what am I? At the national meetings, there is nothing geared to my needs in particular. Nor do I expect that there should be, because now I am a full-fledged analyst, right? Maybe I shouldn't really need any support for my developing analytic identity, because it should already be fully in place … right?
In my own case, graduation had a specific disincentive attached to it, as it meant that I was no longer eligible to be reappointed to the Committee on Institutes, a truly enjoyable and enriching, identity-building experience for me. I had been eligible to serve and to be a full part of the site visit teams as an affiliate member, but not as an uncertified active member. On the other hand, I did receive my statement for a higher level of dues.
There are, I believe, deeper losses. I have found it interesting to observe how the diffusion of one's identity is reflected in the three different names for the analyst at this stage of his or her career: new member (a true misnomer, as many of us have been members in important ways for several years), recent graduate, and junior faculty member. Depending on the relative nurturing style of the home institute, and also upon the degree to which the analyst sees graduation as a significant rite of passage allowing a full-fledged entry into the local psychoanalytic community, these losses include the inevitable disappointments attending any growth, including the de-idealization of one's former mentors. As a graduate, one tends to experience a new kind of sporadic openness on the part of former teachers and supervisors, especially about the deficiencies of other analysts and of the institute that they may have felt it helpful to shield the candidate from during training.
Can anything be done to make graduation more than an occasion for relief, and to mark the occasion as the milestone it signifies? What might allow newly graduated analysts to look forward to the next stage of their careers, their education as analysts, and their life in the local and national community? I have a half-baked
David V. Orbison, Ph.D., is co-chair of the Membership Committee (Council) and a member of Project 2000.
theory: If the period immediately following graduation had some sort of positive definition, perhaps it would not be defined so onerously and so exclusively by the task of certification. As it is, it's graduate (whew!), then back on the treadmill.
Over the last year and a half, a number of us met at the invitation of Jon Meyer to discuss some of these issues. One outcome of our shared thinking is the “Reception for New Members” to be held during the evening of Thursday, December 16, 1999, at the meeting in New York. Its main purpose is to honor analysts who have just graduated and become active members of the American.
While this kind of ritual can have deep significance, it cannot go far in addressing the dilemmas of the newest graduates. After the party is over, we must find ways that recent graduates can pair up with mentors, form discussion groups, join committees, and otherwise become part of the larger group of analysts called the American. These and other topics will be addressed at the “Orientation for New Members” to be held on Saturday morning at the December meeting. One might object that these programs simply create new strata within the membership. Our hope has been that they will instead be seen in the spirit of a sharing of the vast accumulated psychoanalytic wealth.
There is only so much that a professional organization can accomplish in this direction. The more substantive and lasting ways of attending to the needs of recent graduates must occur at the institute level. I recall vividly an experience during a site visit in which I sat in on a theory course co-taught by a senior and a junior faculty member. It was evident that this kind of pairing is usual for this institute. In effect, the ordinary expectation of this institute's grads is that, if interested, they will be involved in mentored teaching. This is a profound response to some of the issues I am raising. First, it conveys a sense that graduation, while important to honor, is only a stop on the long path of the analyst, that there is indeed life after graduation. Second, and more specifically, it subtly carves out an important role for newer graduates. Third, a new link was formed between the co-teachers in which, I feel certain, there was mutual benefit.